It’s no wonder artists are backing Spotify when other Internet music services are short-changing them. This week Google walked out of negotiations to pay royalties to songwriters in Britain on YouTube and iTunes and Amazon are in a track price war, with the latter selling tracks for as little as 29p. But Spotify’s revenue model of selling advertising between songs, (like a personalized radio station) has given artists and labels a new revenue stream in an industry where revenue tributaries are drying up.
By having a huge music library of pretty much everything at the click of a button, the service also discourages illegal music downloads which takes more clicks of a button and has the guilt factor, not to mention illegal – so artists and labels are happy with Spotify, but users are smiling too because the service is just damn good; the interface is just like an iTunes library where you can search easily for tracks and every item (artists, tracks, albums and playlists) in Spotify has a URL associated with it which makes it easy to share with others by being able to import others’ play lists into your library in a couple of seconds.
Oh… and there’s more… Spotify has, this week, opened up their API to third-party developers, meaning we’ll able to access our whole library of our favourite songs on mobiles and other devices very soon. But my love for Spotify goes deeper than just a great service, for me it’s about how we look at ownership of music. I moved around a lot as a kid. I’d moved house 19 times by the age of 18 and attended 11 different schools. Moving meant getting pretty good at being able to get rid of stuff easily without feeling the need to horde items in case of needed them again in the future, which subsequently means I don’t have a strong sense of ownership over possessions. Music has been a passion of mine from a young age, but unlike some of my friends, I never owned a collection of CDs or tapes. What was the point? I would have to lug them to each new house, loosing a few of my favorites on the way.
Then along came iTunes, but my taste in music is huge and eclectic (everything from Van Morrison to Britney and The Rolling Stones to Michael Jackson). To buy all my favourite songs would cost a fortune – I could have bought a few tracks each week, but that would have taken years. So i ended up downloading friend’s entire iTunes libraries which meant i had to wipe the entire iPod if I wanted new songs – frustrating!
This week i read an article on TechCrunch about how The Cloud (virtualised resources) will enable us to have every song ever made in the palm of your hand by using services like Spotify, hang on let me just repeat that – Every song EVER made?! And all just for a few adverts or a small subscription, which by the way, I would be more than happy to pay. And that’s when I realized why I love Spotify: it has enabled me have my passion, music, with me wherever I go, no more lugging boxes, no more fear of loss, no more friend’s crap libraries… it’s up there in The Cloud whenever I need it. I know I don’t ‘own’ it in the flesh like a CD or LP, but I don’t want to, it just doesn’t matter… after all, what do we really ever truly own?
Ok..gone a bit deep there, even by my standards…anyway you can see the TechCrunch story here:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/03/23/how-will-the-cloud-change-the-way-we-think-about-music-ownership/
And check out my Spotify favorites here: spotify:user:hermione:playlist:7r9yzc1fZ5N5PA1MZ5hEN3
And can someone please use the API to build a ‘Spotimix’ app- Spotify is great for ‘Spotifying’ (DJing + Spotify) at parties but there is no feature which allows you to mix tracks yet.
- Me
I’d like to see a web app made that lets you use various API’s to DJ live inside your browser.
MusicHackDay is on the horizon, perhaps you should approach those guys Hermione.
First let me start this comment by saying that Spotify *is* good. They’ve done well to get most mainstream music on board, and sharing streaming playlists is a great way to share music without actually breaking any laws.
However, the hype is starting to get a bit silly. All it’s doing is what last.fm and many other sites have been doing for years – offering free streaming music with some degree of control over what you hear. And don’t forget services like Napster that have been around for years where you pay a monthly subscription for access to all the tracks you want… just like Spotify! I’m also sure it wouldn’t take much effort for iTunes to adopt this model, seeing as they already have all the music on their system, deals with all the labels, and already allow you to listen to streamed 30 second clips.
Yes, no more lugging physical music around (though to be fair, you can always rip CDs/LPs that you buy onto your preferred digital storage media, even if doing so is technically illegal in the UK), but don’t forget that it only works where you have decent Internet access. Could you take it on a camping/hostel trip? No. Will it work on the tube? No. You’re unlikely to get a decent ‘net connection on trains, planes and boats too. With Napster, for instance, you can download as much as you like to up to 3 machines, and a mobile device too if you pay extra – which will all work whether or not you have ‘net access.
And what if Jacko falls out with Spotify, withdraws his catalogue from the service and tells them to ‘Leave Me Alone’, or if the Stones can’t get no ‘Satisfaction’ from the payment model – no more music from them for you.
The API is great news, but right now what they’ve actually offered (I’ve checked out the documentation) is very limited and is some way off allowing you to have a Spotify iPhone app, for instance.
I also wonder how much the artists/labels actually receive when a track of theirs is played by a user. It must currently be fractions of fractions of a penny, if anything at all, given how little advertising is actually on the free service. Yes, their music gets good exposure, like being played on the radio, but if nobody ever goes out to buy it because they can just stream it from Spotify whenever they want for virtually no cost, they’re pretty much shooting themselves in the foot!
As a music owner/listener, I fully appreciate your ‘to buy all my favourite songs would cost a fortune’ sentiment, but in fairness why should you get to hear anything you want for £9.99/month (or free), when I’ve invested about £20,000 in my personal CD collection (I’ve got about 7,000)! It’s not our right to have access for everything we want without paying fair amounts for it. It’s a very socialist idea, in a very capitalist world!
The big question is though, Hermione, are you actually going to sign up for the premium subscription, given your love for the service, to help them keep running? I’ve yet to hear of anyone actually doing so
It all ties in to Generation Free I guess… http://advertising.thelondonpaper.com/generation-free/
@Dave You can’t compare Spotify with Last.fm. Spotify is so far ahead of Last.fm, and nothing new happens now with Last.fm since the owner is CBS.
Itunes has licenses for downloading, not streaming. And the labels will never give them that. They don’t want them to be too powerful. And why should Itunes destroy their very nice download business model with streaming?
Dan..can you let me know about Music Hack Day? I would be interested in attending though I can’t yet code- but anything is possible!
Dave you are, like many people, going to feel unhappy about the way services are changing, I would certainly feel pissed off if i invested in loads of music over the last ten years and now people are getting it for ‘free’. But you have to understand it’s not ‘free’, it’s just a different way to generate revenue…they are still making money for the artists, and yes they might not be paying very much at the moment, but imagine when they have millions more users, which will create more ears, higher fees for advertisers and more payment for the artists.
Increasingly people live a very ‘Global’ existence, ‘citizens of the world’- living in various countries, traveling lots- These people do not have the time to rip CDs/LPs to their laptops or have the means to travel with this much physical stuff.
I’m not sure how Napster works, but on Spotify the songs are not downloaded just cached so this takes up less disk space- devices are getting smaller and so it comes down to a question of space- Maybe in the future when Spotify is mobile it will enable you to cache a number of songs onto your mobile hardware so you will be able to listen on the tube and other places without WIFI.
And you’re probably right- iTunes or similar will easily adopt the same model, it’s just Spotify did it first. Last FM is different and does not play exactly what you want to hear.
I would gladly pay a subscription if Spotify went mobile, but not until i feel i will get the benefit.
Hans – explain to me why/how Spotify is better than last.fm, sorry?
OK, sure, if/when Spotify has hundreds of millions of users, there will be much bigger revenue from the advertising, but CD sales will be dead, and I’ll bet that 1 album sale for an artist will need at least 10,000 track listens on Spotify to make the same amount of money. I suspect the revenue won’t be as good, especially as a lost of people still buy albums just for the one song that they actually like (I know that we the new generation don’t, but the majority who still buy albums in the shops do).
Time to rip is not really an issue, as increasingly online mail order music stores will offer a bundle of both the physical version and the digital download in one, so that you can get the music as soon as its released online (to do with as you please until the end of time), and a hard copy in the post for your proper collection.
Napster offers both streaming, like Spotify, and downloads with DRM (so that if you end your subscription, you can’t listen to the music any more). That way you have instant access to whatever you want when you’re online, but can also download your faves so that you have them when you’re offline too.
If Spotify were to download the tracks in advance of you going offline, as you propose, it would be just the same as iTunes, and thus the artists/labels would want more than a fraction of a penny, although I suppose it could be set up to auto-delete the tracks after, say, 24 hours, though the danger of this would be that someone will come along and hack it.
Last.fm plays exactly what you want to hear if you go to the individual artist’s page, pick the track and press play… just like when you do a search on Spotify!
Ah, interesting, the mobile version is the tipping point for you. I hope Spotify are listening
Loving Spotify to bits… a Spotmix would indeed be cool..
There was an interesting article many years ago about how, followng the explosion in the sale of CE equipment for home musicians, and cheap online distribution, the most important function in music would be that of the arbiters of taste (eg the rise of Superstar DJs).
We have Spotify on all day at our office, but filters such as Share My Playlist (http://tr.im/iDJK) and the Spotify playlists at The Quietus (http://tr.im/iDJo) are pretty much essential.
As regards the old vs new business models of retail vs feels-like-free, Gerd Leonard provides some essential thoughts (http://tr.im/iDKU) as does this article about the end of newspapers (http://tr.im/iCaM).
For publishing Mixtapes the best, by a long shot, is Mixcloud – in closed beta but PM me for an invite code.
Have fun in Amsterdam
Oisin
By the way, I think this story: http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?storycode=1037410 hasn’t really been picked up on much in the digital world yet (perhaps because Music Week’s news is subscription only). I have a subscription to MW, and the jist is that the UK music industry’s OCC (Official Charts Company) will have the world’s first chart for ad-supported music services, such as Spotify, we7.com and last.fm, sometime in the second half of this year – we7 are already on board and they will need the others too to make it fair. This will be separate to its existing Official Subscription Plays Chart, for paid services like Napster, which will be published on the OCC’s site (http://www.theofficialcharts.com) by the end of April.
It’s interesting to see how already on last.fm’s own chart, listed in Music Week, Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex On Fire’ has been No. 1 for the past 6 months, far longer than on the regular singles chart (physical and digital sales). Whether that’s made them any money at all though is not at all clear.
It’s not a question of doing something new, it’s a question of doing something well that people enjoy using.
Social networking sites have been around long before Facebook- but what Facebook did well was pull the best features from other sites and made it simpler to use.
As you say Napster have been offering streaming music for a long time and services like Last Fm do a similar thing- but Last Fm have a limit on the number of times you can play your favourite tacks (especially if they are popular) and other small annoying things.
Spotify, like Twitter, is incredibly simple to use. It’s things like it’s drag and drop feature and being able to share playlists with minimum clicks of a mouse which make it so loveable.
Arguably Facebook has done a lot more than just making social networking simple – it’s a whole social utility with a 2-year old API that’s made it the highest valued web application in the world… but I get your point, Spotify is, at this stage, very clean and simple to use. That wasn’t really what you said in your original post though.
P.S. Here’s the URL for your favourite’s playlist: http://open.spotify.com/user/hermione/playlist/7r9yzc1fZ5N5PA1MZ5hEN3 – it’s a long’un!
It doesn’t matter what i originally said- The conversation has moved on from there – I was replying to your previous point about Spotify not doing something new.
The internals of Facebook are like the insides of a Swiss clock and that’s what make it work so well…outside sleek and simple inside, like clockwork.
Mums and Dads wouldn’t be joining Facebook if it was complicated to use as most would not understand how it works.
As there is more and more information out there and more services thrown at people, it will be the ones like Spotify/Facebook -less complex externally- which will win users.
People are looking for the simple option in a tangle of web complexity.
Hmm, I suspect over half of the 200 million ‘active’ Facebook users don’t make full use of most of its features, including most of our mums and dads – they simply have to log in once a month to be counted in the stat. Only about a third of my Facebook friends (which are a mix of a minority of techies and a majority of regular folks from my past and present) use it in any kind of ‘active’ way – if I go to the profile pages of any of the others, their wall feeds are virtually empty or only have content that is months old.
One problem for Spotify is going to be that, for now, you have to download and install the client. If you could do everything via a web interface (just like you can with Twitter.com vs. using a desktop/mobile app like TweetDeck, for instance), that would improve ease of use for most people – a lot of people only have ‘net access at work where they can’t necessarily install software on their machines.
But yes, you are completely right that an initial level of simplicity is vital for success. I hear ya
And anyone interested in more debate on this stuff should check out this pre-Spotify podcast:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/audio/2008/sep/30/tech.weekly.podcast
Not quite sure why some people get so worked up over this sort of thing.
The way I see it, Spotify is for people who know what they want to listen to, Last.fm is for people who want to discover music they might like, in a community. And there are plenty of other services offering similar things.
I like spotify because of its clean desktop interface, it gives me access to lots of free music, its more accessible than last fm and doesn’t have the community features which I don’t really have time for. Its great!
But people can use whatever they like, why get all worked up about one or they other, in this case they both offer excellent free services that aim to do different things
I agree with Hermione on this matter. I can see that last.fm and Spotify offers different kinds of services, but I find Spotify a bit more ajusted to the “new web” than last.fm. As Hermione pointed put, simplicity is king on the Internet nowadays, especially when people more than ever before use their internet-connected computers as their sole media entertainment system.
The clean interface of Hulu, the simplicity of Spotify and the immediacy of Twitter do very well in the ever growing complexity of the Internet, I think. Myriads of people have myriads of options and choices every time they go on the Internet. Yet, people tend to return to a handful of services like Facebook,Blogger,Redtube, Youtube, Skype, Twitter, amazon, ebay. Roughly one site/service per need it seems.
Spotify could be the “one stop shop” for listening for music online. Last.fm serves a number of needs, and offers a lot of functions but I´m not sure if it really rules any territory. They may be the king of listening statistics and music recommendation but those features takes commitment from users over considerable amounts of time in order to be really useful. The future value of last.fm relies on the willingness of users continuing that commitment. And there are signs that people , especially since last.fm introduced the monthly fee for for international radio users, are not as willing to commit as they perhaps once were.
But I my main concern with last.fm is the slightly confusing interface, the fact that the site is really slow at times (at least in Sweden) and their lack of skills in communicating with their users. I don´t see change in last.fm. I don´t see where the company is heading and I see a growing number of people voicing their frustration over this.
I like last.fm (and the people behind it seems to be really smart and passionate about music and programming) and I scrobble everything I listen to. But as a company and service they are to passive in dealing with their shortcomings for me to have full confidence in their survival and continuing quality of service.
I don’t have much more to add, but did just find this about how you can already hack Spotify (if you have a premium account) to keep the music for good:
http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/04/since_spotify_a.html